The Best Resources To Help Grow Kiwi Businesses

When I think of windy Wellington, my mind is immediately drawn to funky op shops, hipster cafe's and out there art galleries. Unsurprisingly, a boutique, handcrafted peanut butter business, tucked away into a little cobbled corner of Eva Street, fits in seamlessly.

Where most people think of peanut butter as simply a spread that goes really well with jam on a slice of bread, Fix & Fogg have transformed it into something to be experimented with and enjoyed as a spread in its own right. With an array of flavours from dark chocolate, honey, smoke and fire to the newest fruit toast, Fix & Fogg have truly made peanut butter making into an art form.

Life has progressed a lot since the days when the only source of media entertainment was from television screens or movie theatres. The internet has changed everything. For TV producers, in light of the development of platforms such as Netflix, Hulu, and every other online streaming site, legal or illegal, how do you find out how popular your show is, and who your audience is?

When I stream ‘Scandal’ every week from my flat in Auckland, am I registered in their ratings or am I piled together with everyone watching Scandal (legally) from their televisions in America? Do people in China enjoy Game of Thrones as much as the next person? Do people in Switzerland love Korean dramas? These are the questions, and Parrot Analytics has the answers.

Businesses these day spend ridiculous amounts of money on advertising to audiences who just aren't interested and will more often than not, press skip, press the |X| button, report spam, unsubscribe or just keep scrolling. In reality, spam emails and unwanted pop ups are more likely to convince people to not buy a product than they are to pique interest in a product or service - purely from sheer annoyance.

What if there was a way to incentivise people to actually pay attention to advertisements? Where they could engage with adverts that they were actually interested in, in a way that didn't disrupt a video of a baby goat in pyjamas doing parkour or cause my parents to think I have a gambling/porn addiction due to pop ups from streaming movies.

I distinctly remember the point in my life where I realised just how much I had taken my mother's cooking for granted. It was the 3rd week of my second year of university (after having the luxury of being in a catered hall in my first year), it dawned on me that for the rest of my life, I was going to have to think about what I was having for dinner every night, plan out my weeks and do my own grocery shopping.

As someone who has never been particularly conscientious about the environment - a self-confessed shameful New Zealander, I received a politely rude awakening in the form of my die-hard greeny, slightly hippy, social warrior flatmate. All of a sudden, I couldn't get away with sneaking empty cans into the general rubbish bin, buying sunlight dishwashing liquid or using microbeads to exfoliate.

Despite having absolutely no personal knowledge of biology or technology, let alone biotechnology - when I stumbled across Upside Biotechnologies, a company offering regenerative medicine solutions for severe burn patients, I knew that I was on to something revolutionary. This amazing New Zealand start-up has managed to develop the fastest technology for growing human skin to date and can grow enough skin to cover an entire human body in just 16 days. 16 days. In just over two weeks, this company can totally change the life of a severe burn victim.

Bruce ‘Pic‘ Picot is incredibly passionate about peanut butter. So much so, he believes it should be in our emergency kits alongside bottled water, shovels and plasters - and I can't say that I disagree.

Like many girls that have come before me, I went through a phase in my pre-pubescent years of watching YouTubers of the likes of Zoella, sitting around in their rooms, making videos reviews of the truckloads of free makeup they had been sent and all the clothing they had recently purchased, and being paid to do so. Imagine being given free things every day or being paid to try on some foundation and tell people "how "pigmented it is", or that it has "amazing coverage".

If you are a New Zealander, sports fan or not, chances are you’ve got a few laughs out of slipping “Boomfa” or “Me oh my I have enjoyed that yes boy” into an Instagram caption or general sentence. While personally not the biggest of sports fans, I do enjoy hearing the occasional Scotty ‘Sumo’ Stevenson spiel on Radio Hauraki or observing the latest Justin Marshall comment being parroted by impressionable young New Zealander’s everywhere. The key takeaway here is that while Scotty and Justin provide quality commentary, sometimes we just want to hear someone that isn’t a stereotypical white, 50-year-old male sports commentator who’s come out of a 30-year cricket career.

Artificial Intelligence. Words that are becoming increasingly common to hear, yet 10 years ago, was a virtually unknown concept. It is something I frequently read about in the news and Facebook articles in conjunction with people like Elon Musk and Bill Gates, yet I'm guilty of having no real understanding of it. So what is this vague and mysterious "Artificial Intelligence"?